Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: May 16, 2025

I spent the first three days of this week in Berlin facilitating a seminar focused on building individual reflective practices. As always, the opportunity to work with global creative leaders was inspiring, and I left both energized and understanding more about myself and my own ways of acting, reflecting, learning, and growing. The sessions explored multiple research and practitioner perspectives, from Schön’s and Csikszentmihalyi’s classic formulations about reflection and flow to Beckman and Barry’s extension of experiential learning theory to innovation and Ibarra’s call for outsights (rather than insights) to Ethan Kross’ current work on more constructive self-talk. Of particular value were our discussions of the neuroscience-based insights of David Rock, and Iain McGilchrist, and Alia Crum. In other words, we looked beyond more familiar approaches to reflection as solitary, cognitive, and introspective focused on specific activities, like leadership, and expanded our individual and shared reflective practice to be social, multi-domain, and holistic. With that robust survey, the objective for participants was to apply pertinent ideas, and tools drawn from them, to their lives and leadership – and build an individual reflective practice plan they could act on immediately.

Building Your Creative Leadership Reflective Practice

An Executive MBA Seminar at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership

Berlin, Germany, May 12-14, 2025

Martin Buss, Sophie Andler, and Victor Tiberius’ extensive review of 247 management studies produced over 20 years uncovers critical environmental factors enabling female leadership emergence. At its center is a persistent paradox: women comprise only 31% of global leaders and just 5% of CEOs, yet consistently outperform men in leadership effectiveness ratings. The principal insights of the management scholars from the University of Potsdam emerge from role congruity theory: a ‘think manager-think male’ bias creates a double bind, in which women face ‘agentic deficiency’ (perceived as lacking leadership traits) and ‘agentic penalty’ (backlash when displaying authority). However, as research has shown, successful female leaders can master behaviors to navigate this terrain by combining direct communication with empathy, or demonstrating ‘agentic voice’ and speaking up assertively for others’ benefit. Industries also matter, with women facing less bias in education, for example, but struggling more in male-dominated sectors like engineering. Creative leaders can champion women’s long-term advancement by redesigning leadership contexts, including targeted and visible mentoring, allyship, and sponsorship activities and networks, more flexible work arrangements around having children, psychologically safe spaces for diverse forms of authentic leadership expression, and openlychallenging unconscious biases in promotion decisions.

Martin Buss, Sophie Andler, and Victor Tiberius (2025) “Female Leadership: An Integrative Review and Research Framework,” Leadership Quarterly 36, 101858.

Lea-Therese Strobel and her German and U.S. colleagues’ wide-ranging empirical study of 259 German university research units argue for a crucial insight that is often overlooked in creative leadership: namely, that context strength or weakness (highly structured versus unstructured environments with clear or unclear demands and guidelines) determines which approaches work best. Building on Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki’s tripartite framework for creative leadership driving creative outcomes, they identified three distinct manifestations: facilitating (leaders support, say, wth mentoring, while followers generate ideas), directing (leaders create, giving expert guidance, while followers implement), and integrating (leaders and followers collaborate creatively). The new research demonstrates that facilitating and integrating approaches drive idea generation, while directing and integrating fuel innovation outcomes. Notably, STEM fields showed stronger preference for directive leadership compared to humanities. Among the valuable practical takeaways here are that creative leaders should strategically shift between manifestations based on whether they’re cultivating creativity or driving innovation, purposefully distributing creative and supportive tasks between themselves and their teams. Rather than defaulting to one leadership style, in other words, successful creative leaders develop fluency across all three manifestations.

Lea-Therese Strobel, Maria Strobel, Isabell M. Welpe,and M. Audrey Korsgaard (2024) “The Role of Creative Leadership Manifestations in Creativity and Innovation Leadership,” Creativity Research Journal; https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2321734 

Lea-Therese Strobel and her German and U.S. colleagues’ wide-ranging empirical study of 259 German university research units argue for a crucial insight that is often overlooked in creative leadership: namely, that context strength or weakness (highly structured versus unstructured environments with clear or unclear demands and guidelines) determines which approaches work best. Building on Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki’s tripartite framework for creative leadership driving creative outcomes, they identified three distinct manifestations: facilitating (leaders support, say, wth mentoring, while followers generate ideas), directing (leaders create, giving expert guidance, while followers implement), and integrating (leaders and followers collaborate creatively). The new research demonstrates that facilitating and integrating approaches drive idea generation, while directing and integrating fuel innovation outcomes. Notably, STEM fields showed stronger preference for directive leadership compared to humanities. Among the valuable practical takeaways here are that creative leaders should strategically shift between manifestations based on whether they’re cultivating creativity or driving innovation, purposefully distributing creative and supportive tasks between themselves and their teams. Rather than defaulting to one leadership style, in other words, successful creative leaders develop fluency across all three manifestations.

Lea-Therese Strobel, Maria Strobel, Isabell M. Welpe,and M. Audrey Korsgaard (2024) “The Role of Creative Leadership Manifestations in Creativity and Innovation Leadership,” Creativity Research Journal; https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2321734 

Australian journalist and publisher Claire Lehmann’s compelling analysis shows how the shift from written discourse to audio-visual storytelling – or, as others have it, from written culture to ‘postliterate’ oral culture – represents potential warnings for creative leaders about the allure of audience capture. Using examples from Joe Rogan’s platform hosting ‘armchair experts,’ like Daryl Cooper and Dave Smith, to Bret Weinstein’s gaining widespread influence by making sensational claims (like declaring ’17 million vaccine deaths’) and spinning elaborate conspiracy theories spanning multiple domains, Lehmann demonstrates how abandoning rigorous methodologies in favor of engaging narratives produces unreliable conclusions. She establishes a hierarchy of evidence – from gut intuition at the bottom to randomized controlled trials and primary source research at the top – showing how empirical professions maintain quality through graduated standards. The ‘marketplace of emotions’ now rewards sloppy procedures and metholodological shortcults over careful analysis, as she claims ‘rigor dampens engagement.’ Leaders must resist this trend by insisting on methodological excellence in their teams, structuring feedback systems that reward accuracy over engagement, establishing clear evidence standards for decisions, privileging written documentation over (simply) oral traditions, and providing incentives that reward accuracy over viral appeal.

Claire Lehman (2025) “Feelings, Facts, and Our Crisis of Truth: What We Lose When the Rigor of Science and Journalism Give Way to an Aural and Visual Narrative Culture,” The Dispatch, May 9, 2025.

In a previous Highlights post (April 4, 2025), I strongly recommended Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD’s book Tiny Experiments. I recently saw Tanmay Vora’s excellent visualizations of key idea’s from Le Cunff’s book and I’m happy to share that here, as well.